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Android Application Basics

Submitted by admin on Sun, 03/10/2013 - 00:00

Android Applications can be developed in a number of different environments. However, for the most part, they are developed in Eclipse. To help streamline Android-specific conventions, Google provides an Eclipse-based plugin. The development environment runs on several different platforms and is available as open source.

Android applications are written with a combination of Java and XML.

The basic steps to create an application are:

Launch Eclipse, and create a new project by selecting File->New->Android Application Project

A dialog box will appear. Specify an Application Name. (The Project Name will default to this value as well.) Enter a default package name for the application. For SDK details, the only change I made was to support Google-specific APIs. (See # 3 below.) When done, click next.

Accept the system defaults for the next screen. When done, click next.

When it comes to configuring the launcher icon, accept the system defaults again. Proceed by clicking next.

Create a blank activity as described below. Proceed by clicking next.

Accept the defaults for a new blank activity and click finish. (Actually, I changed the default "MainActivity" to "Main", because it seems cleaner.)

You now have an Android skeleton application. Next, I'll create a basic Java class and use it within the application.